I have to admit that I wasn´t very proud of my matplotlib code to represent the temperature values I was gathering with Arduino. It was pretty complex, and too slow. Meanwhile I´ve been facing several issues that requires data representation and searching for alternatives I came across a nice solution, flash charts. I found two projects, one open source, Open Flash Charts, and another commercial, but with a free distribution, FusionCharts

Saturday, March 8, 2008

I´ve spent some time thinking how to backup the data I´m currently storing in my linux server. First of all, I faced the problem of coding the script to backup and then configuring the cron services to execute it daily. When all was working I had to decide where to put those backup files, because leaving them in the server hard disk wasn´t a solution. So I bought an USB hard disk and from time to time I move the backup files there. I was more or less happy with the solution. But some months ago I talk to a friend and co-worker who was starting to use a gmail account as a backup storage. I thought that was a great idea so I started to find a python library that helps me to send all my backups to my auxiliary gmail account, and I found it, libgmail .

At the beginning of this year I decided to take control of my expenses. To do so, I wanted to automate this annoying task as much as possible, to be aware of my expenses without spending too much time. I started gathering data from my bank using the Norma43 format, then adding this info to a database and so on. After all this, I needed to create reports, and I thought that OpenOffice spreadsheets could be a great place to store them.

To create your procedural spreadsheets you can use csv(coma separated value) files, but you loose the ability to set format configurations like font color, column width and so on. With the ooolib, you can use Python to to create procedural OpenOffice spreadsheets easily and without pain. It doesn´t support all the format options you have in Calc, but the main ones. Definitely enough for me.